Borracho [Very Drunk]

Contributors

Introduction by Susana Torruella Level

SUSANA TORRUELLA LEVAL is Director Emerita of El Museo del Barrio, a Puerto Rican, Latino and Latin American museum in New York. She served as the museum’s director from 1994 to 2002, after four years as its Chief Curator. Torruella Leval is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Aperture Foundation, and Dreamyard. In addition, she is on the Editorial Board of the International Center of the Art of the Americas. She previously served on the Overseers’ Committee to Visit the Arts Museums at Harvard College and the Visiting Committee of the Getty Center. Torruella Leval received a BA from Manhattanville College and an MA from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

About the cover artist Jorge Soto Sánchez

JORGE SOTO SÁNCHEZ (1947-1987) was born in East Harlem (El Barrio) to Puerto Rican parents. His family moved to the South Bronx when he was five years old. His artistic talent was evident as early as receiving a scholarship from Saks Fifth Avenue Department Stores to take composition and human anatomy drawing classes. In 1961, Jorge attended two years at Morris High School before enlisting in the Army. He was honorably discharged in 1965. Determined to become an artist, he worked different jobs while devoting himself to his art.

Soto Sánchez became involved with Taller Boricua, the Puerto Rican artists’ collective based in El Barrio, in 1971, serving as director by the mid-1970s. The collective’s mission was to use art as a tool for education and community by sponsoring a wide range of exhibitions, literary readings, dances, festivals and free art classes. Soto Sánchez’s quest to uncover his ancestral routes took him to Puerto Rico in 1972, where he studied Taino artifacts and the canonical works of Puerto Rican artists Jose Campeche and Francisco Oller. He had his first major solo exhibit in Puerto Rico at Galería Tanama in Arecibo in 1973. When he traveled to Mexico to attend the opening of his solo exhibition in 1975, he saw the works of Orozco, Siqueiros, Rivera, and Kahlo and visited pre-Columbian archeological sites, which had a profound effect on his work. In 1977, Soto Sánchez had a solo exhibit at the Association of Hispanic Arts in New York. His last major exhibition was at El Museo de Barrio in 1979. It featured sixty of his pen and ink drawings.

Soto Sánchez’s work, which has recently resurfaced to capture the art community’s attention, can be divided into three categories. The first is expressive drawings of fragmented beings using bold gestural contour lines reminiscent of the Taíno stone carvers. The second category is his appropriation of images from well-known Puerto Rican paintings that he transformed to express social criticism. The third category is his use of collected found objects and photographs to construct painted assemblages of personal experiences representative of social conditions. His distinctive iconography blended African and pre-Columbian motifs, among other traditions, and expressed the multiracial and multicultural composition of Puerto Rican identity. In the mid-1980s, Soto Sánchez became ill and moved to Vermont to convalesce. He remained there until his death, leaving behind a large body of uncatalogued work. His passing created a great void among Nuyorican artists and poets.